How could that comfy, fluffy wool sweater thatâ??s keeping you nice and cozy warm be possibly bad for you or the environment?

Let me give you a few reasons:

1. The amount (thousands of pounds) of pesticides applied to sheep and lambs to control mange, mites, lice, and fleas alone is enough to make you choke.
2. These poisons leech into the soil to pollute ground water, or flow into storm drains and irrigation water supplies.
3. Some of the sheep dip pesticides last for more than a year in the environment.
4. UK sheep workers that have been exposed to these poisons only for a short time show signs of nervous system damage like anxiety and depression.
5. Long term contact has been found to reduce bone formation.

6. Antibiotic feed additives for sheep are used to make up for the overcrowded, unhealthy and inhumane conditions in the pens.
7. These antibiotics also end up in the drinking water supply â?? and in you. The next time you get a bacterial infection, the little buggers are more resistant to the medicine, so you stay sick until your doctor finds an antibiotic dose strong enough to kill them.

Something to chew over when your buying that new sweater this winter.

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Should Quornâ?¢ Be More Explicit About the Chicken Welfare Used to Create Their Products?

Quornâ?¢ is a brand of processed food that provides vegetarians with a protein source that is meat and soy free. That is, if you are lacto-ovo vegetarian. If, however, you are a vegan allergic to soy, you might want to look for another protein source because Quornâ?¢ products are processed with egg whites and milk.

Up until 2004, Quornâ?¢ acquired their eggs from battery chickens. The company began phasing out the battery eggs in 2000 and by 2004; all eggs from Quornâ?¢ products processed in England come from free range chickens.

Quorn and free range chickens

Free range may sound like chickens living life in paradise, but that is far from the truth. Many of the free range hens are kept in sheds that house another 10,000 â?? 15, 000 birds. These hens are de-beaked (what a horrifying experience!). And although they have access to the outdoors, most hens rarely venture out of the sheds and are killed after a year of laying eggs.

Maybe Quornâ?¢ should take this opportunity to go vegan. Besides being better for the environment, the animals, and health, going vegan would increase the companyâ??s sales. Itâ??s a win-for-all situation.

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For those of us who are unfamiliar with Quornâ?¢, it is a brand name of a line of meat-free and soy-free food product that is high in protein content. Quornâ?¢ has been sold in Britain since 1985 and made its US debut in 2002. Today, Quornâ?¢ is the market leader in retailing meat free food.

So if Quornâ?¢ is meat-free and soy-free, what is the source of protein in the food? Good question. Itâ??s an edible fungus called Fusarium venenatum, which, incidentally, is not a mushroom. Mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms.

Because Quornâ?¢ is a processed food; it comes in many shapes and forms. You can get Quornâ?¢ patties, Quornâ?¢ burgers, Quornâ?¢ nuggets, Quornâ?¢ tendersâ?¦the list goes on and on.

Quornâ?¢ mince is just another form of the protein food source that resembles chopped meat. So you can put Quornâ?¢ mince in shepherdâ??s pie, spaghetti, lasagna, Sloppy Joes, chili, and whatever else you feel like.

Strict vegans might want to re-think Quornâ?¢ consumption since it uses egg white as a binder and some products contain milk.

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It seams Coln Firth has put alot of pride into his new green website, so i must apologise for my prejudice against it.

“Colin, i love the shop and the products look superb. But, that website, please”

Tips on how to get the best out of the Eco Age website:-

• The header needs to be wide enough to make an impact, enough room to contain the superb logo that looks much better larger, the contact details and an affilate banner or banner showing instore offers
• The website needs more optimised content, so that your natural rankings improve
• Make sure that the website is aligned and doesnt hang to one side
• The menu should contain keyword links based on the relevant landing pages
• A top menu containing your contact link, home, meet the team etc
• You have canonicalisation with your .co.uk and .com pages, this means that your content will be duplicated and so you need to decide which URL will be your main URL , if that is  .com, then direct all your .co.uk URLS to .com.
• Show any green credentials and affiliations you have as a badge on the site
• You could make much more of the press page, adding actual articles instead of the images of the newpaper articles. Some of these are very small and pixelated.

A snippet of social media ideas:

• Add a blog to the website and have your staff update it on a regualr basis
• Open an Ego Age website and RSS feed green tips and advice into it, add your blog updates to it and offer Twitter only offers via the stream.
• Add all product images, store images and press images to your own Flickr group

Well, thats my 2p’s worth.

Great eco products though at Eco Age

A look at the offline and online offering of Vbites

I popped down to the opening of Heather Mills Vegan cafe ‘Vbites‘ on Saturday as Iâ??d heard whispers of its opening for a few months and fancied seeing what she had done with the old fish eatery that used to be there before. Another think that I wanted to see was how ‘Vbites’ was promoting itself, being interested in media and the way ethical ventures make that leap from hippy idealism (something I have struggled with myself) to cool rich media and an understanding of social capitol.

The opening itself was as my actor friend pointed out “a little frayed around its vegan edges”, with a very loud Glenn Miller band for the old folks, a dodgy microphone for Heathers opening speech and more ‘old media’ journalists that you could shake a stick at.

Heather however looks superb and I was at the front cheering her on as she appeared on top of the building relaxing against the ‘Vbites’ diner style sign. I’ve been an admirer of Heather for years, ever since she appeared on the Big Breakfast and described how she lost her leg by being hit by a police motorcycle. The fact that she was married to a pop star bla bla, doesnâ??t really interest me and I much prefer to read about her animal welfare exploits.

As I was leaving I collared one of their PR girls and said that Iâ??d like her to guest blog and that she needed some advice on her website. I was tempted to grab Heather as she popped out the back of Vbites and beg her to get a new developer, but she was on the phone so I thought Iâ??d leave it.

Now, the Vbites website:

Vbites website

Whatâ??s wrong with the website:

• The menu does not contain keywords specific to the campaign
• The content has not real direction on any of the pages
• No specific menu pages
• Their are no social networking links on the homepage
• No RSS feed for subscriptions to the newsletter
• No real calls to action
• No SEO across the site based on the lack on title tags, keyword inclusion etc
• Lack of pages on the site, if the sitemap is to be trusted
• The press and media page has no rich media or any real content
• The lack of humanity on the site is frightening - add some images of the place, the workers, heather, kids eating lunches, the skaters outside
• There are so many opportunities here for some great social media, so many aspects to the cafe that can be drawn upon to make it both an on and offline success.
• No internal linking
• More inbound links from relevant sources

I do find it unfortunate that allot of vegan and ethical sites are missing the basics of good design and SEO, it doesnâ??t seam important in the grand scheme of things but it does make a profound difference as to how users see you. Any site, no matter what it is saying needs to be making a media statement about its efforts, services or products… it is the fundamentals of it being a website and with all the competition out there, sites like Vbites need to stand out from the crowd or risk just becoming a dead weight online page that tarnishes the offline appeal of a great concept.

I’ll think of a few nice little ideas for Vbites social media and see if we canâ??t get it moving.

One last thing that I think would be nice for Vbites to is to add ‘deliveries’ to its offerings, swift deliveries of ‘Mrs. swirly’ vegan ice cream for example.

I did have difficulty finding any articles to add below this, as it seams most of the press that turned up were only there to slag her off, a bit pathetic on a sunny day to head down there just for that, but … who am i to judge.

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CO2 emissions caused by surfing the web could be about to bite us in the behind

How much CO2 did you create in finding this site and reading these words? How much will I have produced by the time I have finished writing this article?

Before today it isn’t something that I would have really considered, past the energy consumption of my PC and other computer peripherals, of course. And I have been looking for the right eco gadgets to purchase that help me cut down on those emissions (eco reviews on this subject are forthcoming.)

But I never gave a thought to the apparatus that makes the internet possible, that is powered up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Until now.

According to Jonâ??s Swaineâ??s article in the Telelgraph today

â??[m]aking two internet searches through Google produces about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle, it has been estimated.â?�â??Googling has ‘a very definite environmental impact’ according to research conducted by a physicist from Harvard Universityâ?�

[â?¦]

“Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,”

But of course it’s not just Google causing all this CO2 - this is just a part of increased alarm about the relatively little-known environmental impact of computer and internet use.

‘According to Gartner, an American research firm, IT now causes about two per cent of global CO2 emissions and its carbon footprint exceeded that of the world’s aviation industry for the first time in 2007.

Google claimed that the number was “many times too high” and one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2, saying:

“We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers.”‘

[to read Jon Swaineâ??s article Two Google searches 'produce same CO2 as boiling a kettle', in full click here]

So what can we do? Must we stop using the internet? Should we ration ourselves to a certain amount of time per day? Perhaps we should. It’s not welcome news, that’s for sure, but part of the solution to global warming is about us weaning ourselves off our energy addiction and looking for cleaner sources of energy.

An article in The Times, “How you can help reduce the footprint of the Webâ?�, offers additional steps that can be taken by web consumers:

â??[Y]ou can make a difference. Over the years, Internet users have become accustomed to demanding certain levels of service from the websites that they visit. It is now de rigueur for e-commerce sites to present badges certifying that their credit card processing systems are secure.

Savvy users even know to watch for certification that sites they visit are safe from hacker attacks and that have audited privacy policies to protect their identities.Websites now need to be put under pressure to clean up their environmental impacts too and demonstrate that their sites are as green as they can be.â?�

Which begs the question, what can website owners do to satisfy their users that they are making sure that their sites are eco-friendly? Dr Alexander Wissner-Gross, from whom a great deal of this information on the harmful emissions generated by surfing the internet has come, is a physicist & Environmental Fellow at Harvard University.

off-set site emissions here

His website, www.CO2Stats.com, is designed to help webmasters and bloggers to make their sites greener in an auditable way.

Watch this space â?? we shall be investigating his site and any others that can offer us a way to track and off-set the carbon emissions of www.minkbaby.co.uk.